Hopping onto Twitter Thursday morning, the usual things were trending. Hash tags with stupid teenage musings, some of the day’s top news bits, and cultural goings-on. One particular blip caught my eye: “Quatar”.
“Oh, what’s that?”, I mused. Perhaps some athlete I hadn’t heard of, or a new teen idol just popping up onto the radar. Surely, I assumed, this had to be someone’s last name, some pronoun that hadn’t yet been added to my (rather large) vocabulary.
After a few clicks, I made two disappointing discoveries. First, Americans are idiots, and don’t know how to correctly spell the name of the Middle Eastern country of “Qatar’. Second, Qatar beat out America to host the 2022 World Cup.
Still riding the tidal waves of World Cup bandwagon fandom (see here for why I don’t actually care), American’s were heated to learn the tiniest country to ever host the event had beaten us out. Not to mention, they’re in the Middle East – a region of the world that, to Americans, is chocked full of negative connotations.
All bribery rumors and FIFA scandals aside, the most humorous aspect of the Qatar decision is one of their strictly enforced laws, pulled from the US Bureau of Consular Affairs:
Incidents involving insults or obscene language/gestures
often result in arrest, overnight imprisonment, and/or fines whether
the incident occurs between private parties or involves officers of the law.
Insulting someone in public is considered a punishable offense.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this. Hold your horses here for a second- has anyone in Qatar ever witnessed a soccer match?
It’s basically the epitome of obscene language and gestures. Soccer hooligans are infamous for their brutality of insults- not to mention fan-on-fan violence. Packing a bunch of rival European fans into a stadium in 110 degree heat (the average summer temperature in Qatar) and expecting them not to call each other every name in the book is about the equivalent of expecting the average American to find Qatar on a map.
I hope that in addition to plans for ten stadiums by 2022, Qatar is also planning about twenty times as many jails. It will certainly be interesting to see watch the number of fans in the stadiums slowly thin out as games progress, as they're hauled away by law enforcement.
One thing’s for sure, I’ll be all over the 2022 World Cup coverage – and not for the matches.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
